Invalids on High

Abstract Thomas Mann poured scorn on those who sought to read The Magic Mountain merely as a portrait of sanatorium life. By placing the novel in the context of earlier sanatorium romances and medical practices within Davos at that era, however, a new depth emerges which reinforces and intensifies the novel’s wider symbolic claims. In its myriad musings, the novel draws together many of the threads which have emerged from the letters, medical writings, and fiction examined in this book. Mann’s ‘time-romance’ offers one of our most detailed explorations of the fiercely visceral and emotional experiences of illness and exile, of life in what Mann terms ‘this charmed circle of isolation and invalidism’. The chapter examines the role of laughter in the novel; Mann’s first encounters with psychoanalysis; the writings of Davos doctors (including Friedrich Jessen, the original of medical superintendent Behrens), the economics and performance of death, and the temporalities of illness.